The New YorkerModify

Memory is a sieve. How many times have I revisited a work I thought I knew well only to find that I had jettisoned certain details, rewritten moods, imagined a different resolution? I recently felt the indignation of having been thwarted by my own mind following a performance of the most talked-about play in the city this winter, “Bug.”

House lights go down, house lights go up. We’re in a dingy motel room in Oklahoma, the personal abyss of Agnes White (Carrie Coon), a waitress at a local lesbian bar. She is so simpatico with the bed, so slunk on its ugly, generic spread, that we can’t imagine her ever leaving this room—a dank universe of half-hidden crack pipes and wine bottles rendered onto roughly two hundred square feet—and she never will. The immediate sense of Agnes in her cage is that she is prey. But for whom? At the play’s start, the telephone rings. Agnes grabs it off its cradle. No answer. It rings again. No answer. Agnes mouths off into the receiver, puncturing her own somnambulance, as she becomes alert to the possible threat of her stalker ex-husband, Jerry Goss. A kind of apocalyptic deliverance comes to Agnes in the form of another man, a drifter named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), who slips into Agnes’s cloistered world and assuages her unease by assuring her that he’s “no axe murderer.”

The playwright, Tracy Letts (now married to Coon), wrote “Bug” in the nineties, but its themes of paranoia, romance, and contagion make us eager to appropriate the play for our present. The interpretation of “Bug” lodged in my memory had been that of the 2006 film adaptation, directed by the great William Friedkin, starring Ashley Judd as Agnes and Michael Shannon as Peter Evans. Shannon’s Peter is jumpy, sensitive, and, very crucially, sexless; he conveys none of the “old” masculine characteristics of savagery or physical dominance that a woman like Agnes would have long ago developed the instincts to detect. He’s a new man burdened by new anxieties. (My colleague Emily Nussbaum, in a recent review of the play, described Letts’s state of mind when he was writing the script: “Letts, who grew up in Oklahoma, was so shocked by Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that he looked for answers on the then rudimentary web, where he found conspiratorial rabbit holes, freshly dug.”) Smallwood, who is Black, subtly skews the “newness” of Peter; all of a sudden, “Bug” is an interracial love tale, and we become instinctively sympathetic to Peter’s aura of maladjustment. Peter and Agnes pace around each other in the enclosure, testing intimacy, almost sniffing at each other like small beasts. Histories emerge: Agnes relates to Peter the source of her grief, the disappearance of her young son years prior. Peter, who has a fear of the police that makes Agnes understandably antsy, divulges that he’s a veteran of the Gulf War, swiped from the field and made a lab rat by military doctors, who poked and prodded at him relentlessly, causing him to desert.

Friedkin’s film sucked much of the humor and twisted romance from the play, I realized, treating it as straight horror. Although I have some issues with the latest interpretation, directed by David Cromer (it veers hokey, and it is missing the feeling of the vertiginous, the fear that we might be at risk of falling into madness, too), the emphasis on the burnished union between Peter and Agnes resonated. Peter and Agnes have sex and go to sleep. A naked Peter wakes up in the night, complaining of a bug bite. He pinches at the sheets, urging Agnes to see the creature responsible, an aphid. And she makes herself see it. The folie-à-deux plot lurches into motion, the aphid spawns thousands more, burrowing under the characters’ skin. They claw and claw at each other, creating real rivulets of blood. By the time a man named Dr. Sweet, who may or may not be real, breaches the motel room, the logic of conspiracy has utterly taken over. Agnes’s final monologue is a torrent of sense-making, a grieving mother giving herself the answers that years of searching never could. Then, an ending that I’d forgotten, and one that, for the purposes of this column, I’ll need to spoil. (Here is your warning.)

Agnes and Peter strip naked and douse themselves with gasoline. Agnes proclaims her love. They light a match.

Immolation registers to us as ancient. Death in the American theatre is generally ruled by the precepts of Chekhov’s gun, a more modern invention. Hooked on the explosion at the end of “Bug,” I started to see Agnes and Peter as a kind of cultural Adam and Eve, ushering in a world order with their incendiary self-destruction. More pitiable people do not exist; conspiracy gave Agnes, a bearer of shattering loss, purpose. All of this is probably why I unconsciously chose to forget the ending of the play. It had been Agnes’s frightening monologue, her total conversion into Peter’s logic of conspiracy as a salve to her numbing grief, that qualified in my mind as the zenith of self-annihilation. My brain had suspended man and woman in the precipitous moment before sacrifice.

We are not actually flooded with cultural examples of self-immolation. The burning men of DeLillo, in “Players” and “Cosmopolis,” are fringe gadflies, and the 2018 film “Annihilation,” a recent mainstream American text on self-destruction, safely occupies the science-fiction zone. I could not forget the centrality of immolation in “Yr Dead,” the flinty and experimental 2024 début novel by the poet Sam Sax, because immolation is not merely the final expression of despair but the greater organizing principle, the novel’s framing vice. “I can feel the accelerant, heaving and sloshing, at the bottom of my bag,” our narrator, a twenty-seven-year-old bookseller named Ezra, tells us. The flippancy of the title evokes the internet as Purgatory. It is the Trump era. Ezra is a recognizable figure: a radical in New York showing up to this and that protest. On the morning that they decide to make their way to Trump Tower, where they will set themselves on fire, they see the Biblical portent of a goat; the novel is a kind of nonchronological aria taking place in that moment of protracted dying. In the tradition of the dead or dying narrator, memories—of radical Jewish summer camp, of pained queer awakenings—flood Ezra’s narration, as do hallucinations of family history. At times, Ezra invades the consciousness of their parents, their ancestors. The book doesn’t grapple with Ezra’s reasons for self-immolation, treating it almost as a fait accompli. Who could argue with Ezra’s disaffection with protest as an engine for revolution, that protest is no longer enough? As Ezra disintegrates, they find themselves “watching people turn my way with expressions on their face that I’ve never seen before, that I’ll never be able to name—not horror or awe, but something far older and strange.”

The indelible 1963 photograph of Thich Quang Duc, seated in lotus position in the center of a boulevard in Saigon, burning alive, does not exist by coincidence. Malcolm W. Browne, the photographer, later wrote that the night before a monk had advised him “to come to the pagoda at seven the next morning because something very special and important was going to happen.” After the image of Duc circulated, “The Burning Monk” was the name that stuck. Modern study of self-immolation in the West begins, so to say, with the Vietnam War; indivisible from the American response to Duc’s fatal protest was the feeling that the fire could catch Americans like a contagion.

And Americans, the supposed inviolable conscience, did set themselves on fire in despair at the Vietnam War. Before dousing herself with cleaning fluid on a Detroit corner in 1965, Alice Herz, then eighty-two, wrote, “I wanted to burn myself like the monks in Vietnam did.” Herz was a peace activist and refugee who had been denied American citizenship after she refused to promise to defend the country by taking up arms. Roughly eight months after Herz’s death, Norman Morrison, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker pacifist, self-immolated at the Pentagon. A week after that, a twenty-two-year-old seminarian, Roger LaPorte, burned in front of the United Nations.

“And now he is dead—dead by his own hand, everyone will say, a suicide,” Dorothy Day wrote in the Catholic Worker, following the death of LaPorte, who had been a member of the Catholic Worker Movement. “But after all, there is tradition in the Church of what are called ‘victim souls,’ ” individuals chosen by God to suffer, to offer up their pain for the salvation of others, very much like Christ himself. Our secular religion of individualism asks us to fear and to pity victim souls as emissaries of a mental illness, to not understand them. In “Bug,” Peter Evans is deluded—a schizophrenic, as Dr. Sweet diagnoses him. But he is not deluded about the fact that the military weaponized his body. By giving himself to fire, he is taking back control.

This gun country is also fire country. The new century has brought about many self-immolations: pastors, lawyers, musicians, incarcerated individuals, and activists have lit themselves on fire toward political ends, and the culture has responded with invocations of mental instability. Before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside of the Israeli Embassy in D.C., almost two years ago, he alerted selected press of his intentions. Bushnell, who was twenty-five, was on active duty in the Air Force as a cyber-defense operations specialist; he had won the “Air Force Good Conduct Medal” and the “Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.” Bushnell is reported to have been on the path to reintegration, to shedding military fatigues for plainclothes. But civilian life was intolerable to Bushnell—a moral derangement—who spoke with a bristling clear-headedness about his “extreme act of protest,” which was “not extreme at all,” he said, speaking to the camera that would capture his death, “compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers.” In Erik Baker’s brilliant essay on Bushnell’s action, he situates the protest in two histories: that of political self-immolation but within a foundational “edifice of murder and torture and kidnapping” built by this country. Bushnell’s death, live-streamed on Twitch, is the video-era analogue to the Burning Monk.

The airman is one of four Americans, since 2023, who set themselves on fire in explicit protest of the war in Gaza. (At least one of these protesters survived.) Bushnell’s action is the one that managed to puncture the desensitized American consciousness—because he died on video, because he died in his fatigues. The cool heads in the room, the commentariat, warned against the glorification of Bushnell, framing him as a wayward serviceman whose penchant for extremism had been burnished, in childhood, in a strict and isolated Community of Jesus compound. To recognize the lucidity of Bushnell’s rage would be, so the thinking went, to endorse self-immolation, to be at risk of infection. That Bushnell’s protest did not work, that we managed to tolerate an extraordinary show of anguish as inevitable, swallowing actions that have historically sparked revolutionary connection, is yet another sign of an American pathology. ♦

My friend P. and I agree to have lunch at a restaurant equidistant from our respective homes. A nasty rumor about P. has reached my ears. I’m not going to mention it to P., of course. That would be hurtful. But the rumor prompted me to instigate the lunch, out of a solidarity that cannot be revealed.

P. turns up in what looks like a safari suit.

Everyone’s deep into their forties these days and getting touchier by the minute. I must choose my words carefully. “Looking sharp,” I say.

“Pants, jacket, the whole thing—twelve bucks,” P. says.

A thrift store has recently opened in his neighborhood. Everything there fits him. He’s an XL and everything in the store is XL. “I realized something,” P. says. “Everyone dies when they’re XL. It’s the size of death. And now it’s my size.”

We laugh.

The food, when it comes, is excellent.

P. says, “I ran into your friend Simon Morgan.”

“I don’t know any Simon Morgan.”

“Well, he knows you. He sends his regards.”

“Mysterious,” I say, although it’s not really a mystery: Simon Morgan is almost certainly some kind of friendly acquaintance. The problem is my very poor memory, which is worsened by stress, which I have recently felt under a lot of. I’m dating again—dating, as in eating meals with and being interrogated by women I don’t know—and at the same time I’m going through a job-application process that involves a background check, which itself involves giving my fingerprints and listing every address I’ve ever had and, most strange and sinister of all, stating every name and alias I’ve ever used. I ask P., “What do these people think they’re going to find out?”

P. says, “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.” He wears his usual gloomy face. With no lessening of the gloom, he says, “But you know what else is true? Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden—the opposite of a dark secret.”

“A light secret,” I suggest.

“Precisely,” P. says.

“Like an anonymous donation?”

P. shrugs. “It could be a lot more interesting than that.”

“Can you give me an example? One of yours?”

“You want me to tell you a light secret? I can’t do that. It’s a secret.”

I would laugh except that P. isn’t joking. I say, “I’d tell you one of mine, but I can’t think of any.” I’m not joking, either.

“Everybody’s got a light secret. Everybody.”

This is a wonderful thought, and I believe that it reveals P.’s benign essence. Having lunch with him is exactly the kind of thing I’ve decided to do more of. It is a matter of self-care in dark times. I want to socialize more intentionally and discriminately. I want to surround myself with only the wisest and most admirable friends, people whose kindness and good sense are not in question, people with a strong awareness of their lucky stars, witty people, people who like being alive. I know a good number of such people—fine souls. New York is a dirty, untranquil city, but it has a large population of fine souls. What is a fine soul? That is a nice question. It certainly doesn’t mean someone who has never entertained a black thought or someone who has never erred as P. is rumored to have erred.

We split the chocolate ice cream fifty-fifty, then decide to walk it off. But walk it off in which direction? I live uptown, P. lives downtown.

“Why don’t we head downtown,” I suggest.

With a little nod, P. agrees. We set off.

Tenth Avenue is hot, hot, hot, hot. With his epaulets and breast pockets and jacket belt, P. could be a colonial police inspector. Of course I don’t give voice to this thought. Nor do I say out loud that, with his ruminative air and portly gait, he gives the impression of someone chewing over the contents of a second stomach. Don’t make personal remarks, my father once cautioned me, and I have done my best to comply with that instruction. When (last year) P. told me that he was suffering from “burnout,” it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him, without malice I hope, if “burnout” was a new, maybe more dignified way of saying “nervous breakdown.” But I remembered my father, and I confined myself to repeating after him, Burnout? Inexplicably, this simple echo upset P., who responded, Yes, burnout, is that a problem?

The point being that not giving offense isn’t easy, even with the best will in the world. Despite my failing memory, I suffer more and more often from excruciating flashbacks in which I relive moments when I said or did something foolish. The worst, most haunting kind of foolishness is unkindness.

(When I looked into it, I learned that “burnout” is not synonymous with “nervous breakdown,” a term that has fallen into disfavor. A nervous breakdown is a mental-health crisis with a variety of possible causes. Burnout, typically, is a state of dysfunctional exhaustion that results from overwork or from shouldering too many responsibilities for too long. P.’s burnout was presumably atypical.)

Tropical Clouseau P. suddenly stops. “I’m feeling sick,” he says. He puts a hand on his stomach.

We’re standing in front of a deli. “Let’s get you some water,” I say.

I buy P. a bottle of water. He takes a couple of sips.

The deli is filled with cool air and has a little window counter with barstools. P. and I take seats.

“Drink more,” I tell him. “Drink all of it.”

He does as I say. Then I buy him a second bottle and get one for myself, too.

Cartoon by Sarah Kempa

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

We sit next to each other, rehydrating. Since we’re in a deli and not in a restaurant, I permit myself a glance at my phone. There is no trace in my communications history of anyone named Simon Morgan.

One New Yorker after another walks past the window. I’ve lived in this city for a quarter century, and I fear that I am falling out of love with it. But this is a nice moment.

“See that?” P. says. I did see: in front of our noses, a car has quickly and perfectly reversed into a tight parking spot. “That’s a light secret.”

I say, “Parking skillfully?” The driver has gotten out of the car and is looking for something in her pocket. Now she disappears from view. Who is she? Where is she bound? “I thought it was about secretly doing good,” I say. “You know—like a mitzvah, but on the down-low. Schindler. The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

P. shakes his head. “It’s anything that’s admirable,” he says. “Anything that would make people think better of you.”

He has finished his second bottle of water. “I’ll walk you home,” I say. When he protests that it’s out of my way, I insist.

We part company at the corner of his block. “You helped me out today,” P. says. “You’re a good friend.”

Am I, though? What P. doesn’t know, because I have kept it from him, is that a fingerprinting outfit is located a mere stroll away and I planned to go there even before I suggested lunch. In other words, even as I was apparently thoughtfully accommodating P. by walking him home, in secret fact I was not going out of my way for his benefit. It makes me feel bad. I have failed to act with the uberrima fides expected by good friends and insurance companies.

Superior Hand Analytics is an authorized fingerprint taker. Its premises are in Suite 914 of one of those beautiful midtown loft buildings filled with miscellaneous little enterprises and crazy people. I once had a financial adviser who worked in one of those buildings, about whom it was whispered that he had murdered his wife. When I arrive at Suite 914, I am met by a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. It looks like a thoroughly temporary setup—one of those sublets granted for the duration of a lacuna in the lease. Then, from a partitioned area behind yonder photocopying machine, the hand analyst materializes.

She accepts my paperwork and bids me sit down. She takes hold of my left hand. Starting with the thumb, she seizes my fingers one by one and presses them, with a little side-to-side rocking motion, into the ink pad, repeating the process with the fingerprint sheet. She has a firm, kind, thrilling touch. Who is she? What is her story? What path has she taken, what seas has she sailed to be here with me, holding my hand?

“Can I ask how you got into this business?” I ask.

She presses my little finger onto the paper. “Army.”

Army? Interesting!

“Mm,” she says. She points at the paper. “See? You got no good prints there.”

“I don’t have fingerprints?”

“You got poorly defined prints. It happens. The ridges wear out. We see it with nurses—always scrubbing up. You a nurse?”

Either she’s mocking me or she’s curious. “A nurse? No, I’m not a nurse.” I tell her, very generally, about the work I do.

The hand analyst grips my hand some more, authoritatively. I’m sure she made sergeant. I’m sure she is a fine soul. She says, “That work make you wash your hands a lot?”

“No,” I confess. However—I decide not to tell her this—I am a diligent hand washer. I don’t hesitate to use a little wooden nail brush on my fingertips. Is that strange? Am I an outlier?

She tells me not to worry, it’s all going to be O.K., the F.B.I.’s going to have plenty to work with. My face must have expressed something, because now she’s saying, “That’s where the prints go—Federal Bureau of Investigation. You didn’t know that?” She rerolls one of my problematic fingers in the ink, blackening it even more intensely. “Yes, sir—eff, bee, eye.”

When she’s done making prints, she takes each darkened finger in turn and repeatedly yanks on it with a towelette. Very soon, my hands are clean and she must let go of them, and there is nothing to be done.

T hat night, I have a dinner date with my friends Fred and Sejal at their home, in Brooklyn. I drive across the Triborough Bridge in the bright early evening, and soon after I catch full sight of summery Manhattan Island, its newest, tallest towers rising as if from a meadow. It is beautiful to behold, even in dark times.

I arrive a little early. What’s his name, the son, whom I have known since he was a baby, now transformed into a long-limbed high schooler, thunders downstairs to answer the door. Sejal is covering the table with a cotton sheet brightly patterned with orange-and-yellow circle segments. “It’ll be cheerful,” Sejal says. “Or is it too wrinkled?”

Fred says, “Too wrinkled? Nobody cares about wrinkles anymore.”

He is cooking Norwegian halibut with green olives and calamondins. Calamondins, he teaches me, are a small, sour citrus fruit. They have recently appeared on the little calamondin tree that grows in the pot outside the front door. You remove the seeds, roast the orange globes atop the fish, then eat them, peel and all. Fred says, “I hope you guys will like it—but I’m not going to stress about it. That would be meaningless stress. I don’t do meaningless stress. Not anymore.”

“What,” I ask, “would be meaningful stress?”

“Meaningful stress,” Fred says, “is when you’re digging children out of the rubble.” He gives me a hug of welcome.

Boy, it feels good—the hug, the home, the hope. I want more of it. I want to see more of fortunate people—men and women with strong marriages and functional children and healthy parents and happy lives.

The sound of laughter reaches us. It’s Werner and Nicky. “I’ll get it,” I say.

When I open the front door, the racket of a helicopter suddenly fills the air. It is at once terrifically loud and invisible, as if made by a god. The three of us stand on the stoop, looking skyward.

Sejal’s voice says, “Come in, come in, I’m so sorry, just ignore it, it’ll go away.” Werner answers her with a hug so powerful that he fractionally lifts her off her feet.

“O.K.,” Sejal says, and laughs, then double-locks the front door.

As Fred is serving drinks, a deep physical vibration passes through the house. “It must be right above us,” he says, going to the rear window. He peers out. “Who knows what they’re looking for this time.” He locks the back door. “Now it’s moving away.”

It’s true: the chopper is less audible.

It is my duty, I feel, to lighten things up. “I almost fell in love today,” I declare. Naturally, everyone is curious. I describe my visit to the hand analyst and tell of how she carefully held my hand.

“That’s such a lonely story,” Sejal says.

“You gave your fingerprints to the F.B.I.? Are you out of your mind?”

The person saying this is Werner. He and I are acquainted, sure, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends. We’ve met only at dinners hosted by Sejal and Fred, who got to know Nicky and Werner because they and their children were in a COVID pod together in Montauk. I, who was getting divorced at the time, was in a heavenly pod of one.

“It’s just routine,” I tell Werner. “You know—criminal record, identity history . . .”

Werner says, “Identity history? Who has an identity history? What does that even mean? What are we doing here?”

The chopper is back, louder than ever.

“Hey, guys.” It’s Fred, who has been peering out of the front window. “Get over here. There’s something you need to see.”

We all inspect the street for something untoward.

“I don’t get it,” Nicky says.

“Our cars!” Fred shouts. “Look at them! All parked in a row! Right in front of the house!”

We laugh. “Oh, Fred, you’re so funny,” Nicky says. Fred notoriously claims that his block, on which cars are parked diagonally to the curb, like police cars outside a police station, is the best block for parking in New York.

Of course, all this puts me in mind of P. and his crazy theory of the unacknowledged parallel parker. When we are seated and eating Fred’s (delicious) halibut, I make a second announcement: “I had lunch with P. today.”

“How is poor P.?” Sejal asks.

“Why ‘poor’ P.?” Fred asks Sejal.

Werner says, “Is this the P. who . . . ?”

Fred says, “Yup.”

“And you had lunch with him?” Nicky says.

I look around the table. “We go way back,” I say.

“Did he say anything to you?” Nicky demands.

“If you mean—no, he didn’t. It didn’t come up. Why would it?”

“Because you ‘go way back,’ ” Nicky says, actually making quote signs.

The house is shaking. Red flashes and white flashes of electric light enter from the twilit street. “Now what?” Fred shouts.

Everyone follows him toward the lights and the noise. “Stay inside,” Fred sharply tells his son, who has joined us. And there, visible at last, is the glittering police helicopter, hovering above the street, then banking out of sight. While the others stay at the front window, discussing what they can and can’t see and what may or may not be afoot, I drift away. I want to keep my distance from Nicky. Why was she so rude to me? Is P. her foe? Am I her foe, too, on account of my lunch with P.? Is it possible that during our very occasional dealings I once hurt her feelings? Did the hand-analyst story bother her?

Who knows. Who cares. Human society suddenly feels overwhelmingly trivial and stupid and not worth the trouble.

There are two boys in the back yard. I see them clearly enough from my vantage point at the rear window. They are crouched under the metal staircase that leads down to the garden from the floor we’re on, the parlor floor. The boys are in their mid-teens, I’d guess. They are trying to hide among the gardening equipment. The bigger one is holding the shoulders of the smaller one, whose hands cover his own ears. Both look terrified.

Fred approaches me. “See anything out there?”

I shake my head.

The helicopter roar subsides. Everyone returns to the halibut.

Werner speaks up. “You want to talk about parking? Here’s something that really shook me.” When he’s satisfied he has our full attention, he goes on, “So I’m at this function thing, talking to these guys—reinsurance guys. You know what one of them says? On his block, which is in Brooklyn, on his block, people have started not moving their cars on street-cleaning days. They’re just leaving the cars on the street.”

“Why would they do that?” Sejal asks.

“Why? Because it’s easier to pay the sixty-five-dollar parking ticket.”

“Where is this block?” Fred asks. “I’m going with Cobble Hill.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t have given him that cookie?”

Cartoon by Will Santino

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

“Carroll Gardens,” I say.

Werner says, “That’s not relevant. The block is not relevant.” He seems upset. “Do we not get that? I’m not talking about parking. I’m not talking about street cleaning. I’m talking about the implications. Do I have to spell out the implications?” He is looking squarely at me, as if I’m the one whose grasp of the implications is in doubt.

The table is quiet, and then Sejal laughs and says gently, “I think we get the implications, Werner.”

Werner says, “I’m sorry, I get worked up much too easily, this country is driving me out of my mind, I didn’t mean to raise my voice, poor Nicky has to put up with it, it’s, it’s . . .” He seems to be choking.

“No need to apologize,” Fred says. “Are you crazy? We’re all in the same boat here.”

I am nodding in agreement—but Werner’s outburst, like his wife’s, was made in a spirit of hostility, with me as the object. Why me I don’t know and don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, the final nail has been hammered into this dinner’s coffin. When the conversation moves on, I privately go my own way. I eat another portion of fish and I drink another glass of wine and I smile, but otherwise I keep my mouth shut. I have not driven across multiple boroughs to be harangued. I leave at the earliest opportunity that’s consistent with not giving offense to my hosts.

Night has fallen. When the dashboard welcomes me with its merry multicolored constellation, I feel halfway home. When I am really halfway home, I remember the two young fugitives. How could they have slipped my mind? They are out there somewhere, enjoying the cover of darkness. Good luck to them!

Three weeks later, I learn that P., who is forty-seven years old, has been dead for several days.

My mother once foretold that I would find happiness with a foreign woman. When I asked why, she replied that a foreign woman was more likely to appreciate my traits. My traits? I said. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t inquire further. Let sleeping dogs lie.

At any rate: this is my first-ever date with a foreigner. Sometimes I have trouble committing a person’s name to memory, but in this case I am helped by a rhyme. My date is named Martina, and she is from Argentina.

We meet at a tapas bar in Chelsea. She has long dark hair and flashing, kind eyes. We eat croquetas and chorizo al vino and calamares fritos, and we drink Rioja. It is hard to believe that this woman, so balanced and open-minded and uninjured by life, could be single. How interesting to learn about the discothèques of Buenos Aires! How pleasant to reminisce about my childhood in Sacramento! What a happy respite from the dark times! Things go so well that I confide in my companion. The confidence is as follows: I believe that she, Martina, is a fine soul. Martina smiles—whether out of amusement or gratification or embarrassment, I cannot tell. What is a fine soul? she asks. Can you give me an example? By way of an answer, to my own surprise, I talk about P., beginning by explaining that his name was Paolo, but he liked to be called ‘P.’ And suddenly I’m turning my head away from her and drying my eyes with a cocktail napkin and laughing apologetically.

Am I dreaming, or did Martina place her hand on my hand, fleetingly?

I share with her that my old friend P. died alone in his apartment, from natural causes, according to an announcement his family made on P.’s Instagram page, never offering more particulars, which for some reason I found painful; that last Friday I went to his funeral service, organized by P.’s aunt, at a funeral home in New Jersey; that it was a strange and sad affair from my point of view, because the family, which was totally unprepared for the whole business and still in shock, had let it be known that all of P.’s friends were welcome to attend the service, but in the end, other than myself, only two nonfamily people turned up, neither of whom I recognized, not even the guy who shook my hand and said, with a mysterious air of significance, Long time, no see; and that moreover P.’s family, which hails from Maine, was represented at the service only by the aunt and her four daughters and various plus-ones, out of all of whom the aunt seemingly was the only one with any personal knowledge of P., and even then, as her brief eulogy revealed, she recalled him only as an only child in Maine, splashing around on the sand beach in a little yellow sun hat, on Fortunes Rocks Beach, to be exact, and not as an adult in New York, which was why she, the aunt, invited those present, “who I’m sure got to know Paolo much better than I ever did,” to offer their memories of P., whereupon none of us spoke up, in my case because I simply could not recall in anecdotal detail the numerous what-ought-to-have-been rememberable times that P. and I had shared from college days onward, all of it was a fog, I tell Martina, except in one important regard, namely, my heart was not a fog, my heart clearly and truly contained my affection and I guess love for P., but of course this fact about my heart was too solipsistic to mention at P.’s funeral, at which the only truly specific thing about my deceased friend that came to my mind was that he and I had blissfully smoked thousands of cigarettes together as young men, which was another inappropriate fact, in the circumstances, needless to say.

Martina says, “Why so few friends came?”

P., I explain, was funny and thoughtful, always noticing this and that, always good company, a cultured person, always going to movies and art galleries and restaurants, always popular—until the last months of his life, when an ugly rumor cast a shadow over him, a rumor that I would not repeat to Martina, not only out of respect for P.’s memory but also out of my general distaste for ugly rumors, a rumor that naturally caused P. to suffer what must have been a very painful loss of reputation and undoubtedly turned people against him, even in death.

“That is a sad story,” Martina says.

“It is.” I’m tempted to add, The good that men do is oft interred with their bones, but I think that would be stretching it, bearing in mind this is a first date, and in any case I’m not sure I’ve got the quote right. “But to go back to your question,” I say, cheerfully, “let me give you an example of why P. was a fine soul.” This is when I mention P.’s concept of the secret that is the antithesis of the shameful hidden fact, the secret that nobody looks for, the secret whose existence is itself a secret: the light secret. Martina listens and smiles.

Soon it is time to leave. While my date briefly absents herself, I take care of the check—for once, I feel flush, I’ve started my new job—and then she and I step out into the brilliance and kinesis of a timeless, darkless New York night. New York! I suddenly feel very fortunate, and I would like my hand to hold Martina’s. Instead, at her request, I use it—my hand, that is, not Martina’s—to hail her a cab.

She doesn’t answer my follow-up text. Or the text after that. My traits have not travelled.

My practice is to direct unidentified calls to voice mail and to listen to voice messages once a week. Days can pass, in other words, between the receipt of an unidentified call and the moment I listen to the message left by the caller.

This is what happens in the case of a caller with a New York area code who phones twice and, after the second call, leaves a message. Four days go by before I listen to it:

Hey there—it’s Simon, Simon Morgan. It was good to see you at P.’s funeral. You know, it was P. who gave me your number. Anyway. Um, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you, if I could. A personal thing. Sounds a little weird, I know. But there’s something I’d like to straighten out. If that’s O.K. with you. Maybe we could grab a coffee or something? Let me know. Thanks.

I call Sejal. She says, “Yes, that is weird.”

“He wants to straighten things out? What things? What does he mean, ‘straighten out?’ ”

“Mm,” Sejal says.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know the guy. And there’s zero trace of him online. Is Simon Morgan even a real person?”

“Look, just ignore him. If he starts harassing you, then it’s a different story. But for now do nothing. Don’t even answer him.”

“It’s stressful,” I say.

“It must be,” Sejal says. “Are you O.K.?”

I don’t have to say anything about my ongoing financial difficulties. She knows the score. “Honestly,” I say, “I might be close to burnout.”

About a month later, a handwritten letter arrives in the mail. It’s from Simon Morgan. How did he get my address? I’m frightened, as if a ghost has written me.

The letter begins,

I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion. But there is something I feel I must say to you.

The rest I scan quickly.

It boils down to this: Simon Morgan is a self-described “addict.” As part of his recovery program, he has vowed to make amends for the harm he has caused others. To this end, he wants to remind me of the help I gave him back in the day, help that I offered with a pure heart, help that, until now, he has never acknowledged or thanked me for. Enclosed is a check for two hundred dollars, which is the amount I loaned him all those years ago and never requested repayment for.

I don’t cash the check. How could I? I don’t remember him. When Sejal asks me whatever happened to Simon Morgan, I represent to her that I never heard from him again and that Simon Morgan, if that’s his name, must have got me mixed up with someone else. ♦

Among the Emberá people of Colombia, almost nobody uses the word “suicide.” Instead, loved ones speak of jais, the native word for “spirits.” The Emberá are a large Indigenous community living in remote villages along the country’s west coast, a region plagued by acute poverty and violence from armed groups that are vying for drug-trafficking routes. “The jais are taking our children away,” one member of the community told Santiago Mesa, a Colombian photographer who has been documenting the surge of Emberá youth suicides in recent years. The jais are believed to be malign forces that appear mostly at night, taking over their victims’ consciousness and forcing them to end their lives. Mesa, a native of Medellín, visited the Emberá in mid-2024, not long after a sixteen-year-old named Yadira Birry hanged herself at her school using a traditional paruma, a large, colorful piece of cloth that women use as long skirts.

The girl’s mother, Miralba Birry, told Mesa, “Before Yadira killed herself, people in our community didn’t think much about that.” But soon after Yadira’s death ten more members in her village, a community of only a hundred and forty-one people, also attempted to kill themselves using parumas. One of them was Luisa, Yadira’s older sister. The girl mentioned to Mesa that she had been seeing Yadira in her dreams, beckoning her to the other side. “Yadira tells me she’s doing O.K., but she never lets me see her face,” Luisa said. Her mother took her to a jaibaná, a traditional priest, who tried to keep the jais at bay with smoke and prayers. “My daughter’s case was part of that same illness,” Miralba said.

Mesa’s photo series, titled “Jaidë,” or “House of Spirits,” conjures the mystical outlook of the women he met, using an ethereal yellow-and-orange palette to portray the grieving. An overexposed photo shows Miralba from the torso up, looking into a white sky, with a ray of light almost sanctifying her face. Another picture shows three of the Birry sisters wearing their red-and-blue parumas on their heads, lingering like ghosts around Yadira’s grave. For another shot, Mesa asked Yadira’s family to stand in front of lighted candles one evening, in the classroom where she died.

“By then, the local authorities were very worried about it happening so often,” Mesa told me. “They had never witnessed something like this at this scale.” The Emberá elders say that they have been noticing a rise in suicide attempts since around 2015. According to UNICEF, the annual suicide rate among the Emberá is some five hundred cases per hundred thousand people, nearly a hundred times higher than the rate among Colombians at large. Yet the phenomenon is hard to track in the remote villages where the Emberá live, not just because most can be reached only by boat, and have little phone service, but also because of the taboo around the topic.

In the municipality of Bojayá, an Emberá man named José Luis Dogirama Sanapi is keeping his own record, in a notebook listing the names of the hundred and twelve people who have died by suicide in the past ten years, plus the four hundred and twenty-three who have attempted to kill themselves. He became interested in the subject because of his own past yearning for death, which he came to understand as a result of the never-ending violence plaguing his ancestral land. “In 1997, a guerrilla group forcibly recruited me into their ranks,” Sanapi told me by phone. “I lost eight years of my life in a living hell, and when I came back home I was completely traumatized.” He eventually found solace working with a local church.

Mesa, too, pursued his photography project, in part, because he’d has his own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mental health stabilized with the help of therapy and S.S.R.I.s. “Fifteen days after taking the medicine, I no longer felt cramps in my feet, no longer had mental fog,” he recalled. Enjoying a clear mind, he started to pay more attention to the tragic and puzzling news of suicides coming out of the Emberá territories. “Jaidë” wasn’t the first time that Mesa had felt compelled to chase death with a camera. He now lives in Bogotá but had previously worked for a tabloid in his home town of Medellín, where he’d often photograph the bodies of people who had been killed by hit men, or sicarios, a crime that is still common in a city that once was ruled by Pablo Escobar. “I needed to do something different after that work, something far away from classic photojournalism, something less explicit and more dreamlike,” Mesa said.

He discovered that most of those dying by suicide among the Emberá were women, and that there were common forces behind their despair. One was domestic violence. In the rain forest, Mesa met a mother of three kids who had attempted suicide in 2023. She did not hesitate to identify her husband as the main reason behind her wish to die. “I just couldn’t take his abuse anymore,” she said. (Having survived the suicide attempt, the woman remains married to the same man; divorce in the Emberá community is considered out of the question.) Often, the hostilities that women described facing were both personal and societal. Before making his first trip to the Pacific Coast, Mesa met two trans Emberá women living in Bogotá, who had attempted to die by suicide while living in crowded shelters for homeless Emberá. “They had left their land because of violence among guerrillas and paramilitaries,” Mesa said. “They survive in absolute poverty, and their families reject them for being trans. How much harder could life get?” In “Jaidë,” one of them, Ahitana, poses for a photo while looking down at the floor of a shelter, her expression defeated, her face barely illuminated by a small ray of light.

Mesa told me, “I am not sure this crisis can be fixed with a medical visit to these remote areas, because there is something more structurally wrong there, a strong feeling that you’re not part of a society.” When he visited the Emberá, several armed groups had imposed a curfew, and villagers could leave their homes only in the morning, to farm. “Some people say that their lands have been cursed by the armed conflict, that the spirits of those killed are the ones that haunt the young ones who then want to commit suicide.”

Mesa’s goal was to capture that haunting, and no photograph does so more vividly than one of Luisa Ignacia Chamorro, a young woman who had tried to hang herself seven days before their meeting. It was her second attempt. She spoke a bit about the jais, but then she cut the conversation short and allowed Mesa to follow her as she cropped the grass in front of her home. His image shows her kneeling with her face turned away from the camera. Rain falls around her. She grips a machete in one hand and holds it across her body, preparing to bring it slashing toward the ground.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to Minneapolis to assist ICE agents who have been conducting extensive and violent operations in the city. Clashes between those agents and protesters have intensified over the past ten days, after an ICE agent shot and killed a Minneapolis resident named Renee Good. Trump has previously raised the prospect of using the Insurrection Act—which grants the President vast powers to deploy the military to enforce domestic law—if, he said, courts, governors, or mayors were “holding us up.”

To talk about the history and text of the Insurrection Act, and exactly what it does and does not allow, I recently spoke by phone with Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, and an expert on Presidential emergency powers. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the possible limits courts might place on the President, the arguments over Supreme Court precedents and how they might alternately impede or liberate Trump, and the dangers of the military working as a “force amplifier” for ICE.

Before the President’s declaration on Thursday that he might invoke the Insurrection Act, for months he had been sending the National Guard to cities, although that seems to have come to an end after a recent Supreme Court ruling. Can you talk about what that ruling said and why it may have stymied the President, at least in terms of the National Guard?

It actually didn’t stymie the President in terms of the National Guard. It stymied the President in terms of the law he was relying on, which is 10 U.S.C. § 12406. That law does authorize federalization and deployment of the National Guard, but so does the Insurrection Act, and the Supreme Court did not rule on the Insurrection Act. So insofar as the Insurrection Act is still on the table, federalization of the National Guard is still on the table.

What the Supreme Court held was that Trump could not rely on 10 U.S.C. § 12406 except in situations where he also had legal authority to deploy active-duty armed forces, but where deploying those armed forces would not be sufficient to execute the laws of the United States. And that ruling was based on language in 10 U.S.C. § 12406 saying that the President can federalize the National Guard only if the President is unable with regular forces to execute the law.

Right, so that was a 6–3 ruling, with Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three more liberal justices. The ruling makes it seem that the law is written, or interpreted by the Supreme Court, in a way that suggests that deploying the National Guard is more serious than deploying regular armed forces because you have to exhaust your possibilities with the regular armed forces before mobilizing the National Guard. I think most people listening to this would think, Oh, the National Guard would be less serious than actually sending in a division of the Marines.

Yes, it is certainly counterintuitive. It seems like pulling out a howitzer when a rifle would suffice, but it’s actually not. You have to look at what was going on in the early nineteen hundreds s when 10 U.S.C. § 12406 was passed. It’s not that the National Guard was considered to be more serious at the time; it’s that the National Guard was thought to be less competent. The National Guard was considered to be unruly, undisciplined, and disorganized, to the point that when they were deployed, it often resulted in bloodshed, or at least that was the perception back then. That’s why the legislative history is what it is.

But 10 U.S.C. § 12406 is the only law that requires that active-duty armed forces be first, or at least that the President considers using them before going to the National Guard. The Insurrection Act does not have any such requirements. So, under the Insurrection Act, the President could deploy federalized National Guard forces if that’s what he wanted to do.

Let’s then take a step back. Can you talk about what the Insurrection Act is?

I think the best way to think about the Insurrection Act is that it’s the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. That’s the law that normally prohibits federal armed forces from participating in civilian law enforcement. The Insurrection Act allows the President to deploy active-duty armed forces or to federalize and deploy National Guard forces to quell civil unrest or to execute the law in a crisis.

Posse Comitatus was signed into law in 1878. The Insurrection Act is an amalgamation of laws passed between 1792 and 1874. So even the last meaningful update of the Insurrection Act happened before the passage of Posse Comitatus. At the time, it was an authorization, not an exception. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibited federal armed forces from participating in law enforcement unless there is an express statutory or constitutional exception. And the Insurrection Act, which already existed, constitutes such an exception.

I recently read a piece by Jack Goldsmith basically saying that the Insurrection Act more or less gives the President power to do what he wants—incredibly broad power. Is that your analysis, too?

Well, it gives the President remarkable power. I don’t think it gives the President the power to do anything he wants. There are criteria in the Insurrection Act for deployment. Those criteria are on their face broad, and the law gives the President significant discretion. However, the Department of Justice has long taken the position that the law is limited by the Constitution and tradition, and so the department has interpreted the Insurrection Act to apply in a much narrower set of circumstances than the actual text of the law would suggest. I think that’s an important gloss.

Does it matter what the Department of Justice said in the past, given how we’ve seen the D.O.J. act in 2026?

Well, the Department of Justice tends to argue that it matters what it has said in the past. Now, of course, this Department of Justice might not make that argument, but certainly anyone challenging the invocation of the Insurrection Act will. And they won’t just be saying that the Court should defer to the Department of Justice’s past interpretations. They will be pointing out that those interpretations are in fact grounded in the Constitution and tradition.

What kind of limits has the department thought were reasonable in the past?

There is a 1964 memorandum that takes the position that the law should be invoked only in three circumstances. First, if a state requests assistance to put down an insurrection against the state government. Second, if invocation of the Insurrection Act is necessary to enforce a federal court order. And third, if state and local law enforcement has completely broken down.

The most recent invocation of the act was by President George H. W. Bush, in 1992, during the riots after the Rodney King verdict, which I think would possibly fit under your third example. Before that, the act was invoked during the civil-rights movement, which I guess would maybe be your second example. Is that more or less accurate?

I would say that that is more or less accurate. And to put a finer point on it, at least in the past hundred and thirty years, the Insurrection Act has only been invoked when a governor has requested assistance because state and local law enforcement was completely overwhelmed—an obvious example would be Los Angeles in 1992, when riots killed sixty-three people and caused a billion dollars’ worth of damage—or when states themselves were actively obstructing civil-rights laws and federal court orders implementing civil-rights law.

Which is the opposite of your first circumstance, where states are requesting federal help, because obviously the governors of segregationist states were not requesting federal help during segregation.

Exactly. And there was a similar situation during Reconstruction.

The law says, however, that the President can use force “as he considers necessary.”

In specific situations.

O.K. So what are those situations?

It’s quite wordy, and the law is filled with vague and archaic terms, but essentially there needs to be some kind of obstruction to the execution of federal law or state civil-rights laws, and that is a meaningful limit. As broad as that is, it is still a meaningful limit in the sense that, for example, you couldn’t use the Insurrection Act to address street crimes. Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act in Chicago to address violent crime, and those types of crimes are governed by state and local law. That’s not obstruction of federal law. So there are limits.

I thought that Supreme Court precedent basically said what is “necessary” can be defined by the President.

Not entirely. There is an 1827 Supreme Court decision that includes language to the effect that the President is the sole judge.

This is Martin v. Mott that you are talking about?

Right. However, as the plaintiffs have argued in the recent litigation over the deployment of National Guard forces, the facts of that case were extremely different from the facts of the deployments that President Trump has attempted or undertaken or proposed, because, in that case, a soldier refused orders to deploy during the War of 1812. And what the Court was looking at was whether a soldier could essentially go to court to refuse to deploy during a foreign invasion, and that implicates some of the President’s most potent powers in the area of foreign relations. That’s very, very different from a domestic deployment scenario during civil unrest for the purpose of executing civilian law. And the question of whether a soldier can challenge the President’s authority is a different question from whether the authority can be challenged at all.

There’s also the fact that since Martin v. Mott, the Supreme Court has issued several decisions that suggest that there is an exception to the rule that was articulated in Martin v. Mott, for situations in which the President is acting in bad faith, where he has exceeded a “permitted range of honest judgment,” where he has acted in a way that involves “manifestly unauthorized exercises of power,” or where he has made an “obvious mistake,” and I’m piecing together quotes from different decisions. So to tease out a general rule from those cases, the President can cross a line where the courts have the authority to step in.

So, if courts determine that, say, Trump is sending troops to a city to lock up political opponents, they might rule against him?

“As he considers necessary” relates to the steps he can take if the criteria are satisfied. I’m sort of oversimplifying, because the statute is very wordy, but there are three different provisions of the Insurrection Act. In one of the provisions, there is language that vests in the President the discretion to determine whether the criteria have been satisfied. The other two provisions do not have such language. I think the Supreme Court’s case law indicates that even the broadest of discretion can be abused, so that even the provision of the Insurrection Act that vests discretion in the President permits intervention by the courts in a situation where the actions of the President are manifestly unauthorized, or when the President has acted in bad faith.

There’s one other thing I should say, which is that even though Martin v. Mott addressed the Insurrection Act and not 10 U.S.C. § 12406, in the recent litigation over that law, the Administration argued that the rule of deference—I should say, the rule of judicial non-reviewability—in Martin v. Mott should apply, and the Ninth Circuit interpreted Martin v. Mott as requiring very substantial deference, but not absolute deference. And what the Ninth Circuit said was that the President just needed a “colorable” basis for his determination, which means a plausible basis, but that the court could review the determination to make sure there was a colorable basis.

Did you think there were clues about how the Court might rule on the Insurrection Act in the recent National Guard case we discussed? And what specifically did you make of Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence and especially a footnote of his that people have focussed on?

Because the majority held that under 10 U.S.C. § 12406 the President needs to have the authority to deploy the active-duty armed forces and at least consider using the armed forces before deploying and before federalizing the National Guard, people thought this decision might actually result in the President going first to the active-duty armed forces. But I think that analysis overreads the majority opinion. As we discussed, the rule that the President has to go first to the active-duty armed forces only applies when the President is taking action under 10 U.S.C. § 12406.

There is an implication in that Kavanaugh footnote in his concurrence that the President might, instead of invoking the Insurrection Act, rely on a supposed inherent constitutional power to deploy active-duty armed forces to protect federal property personnel and functions. But that claimed inherent power has never been squarely endorsed by the courts. That is a long-standing executive-branch theory, but there are many holes in the theory, and it is far from the settled law that the Administration tries to present it as being.

Do you think the Insurrection Act needs to be changed or repealed or updated?

Yeah, it absolutely needs to be reformed. On its face, it gives the President a dangerous amount of discretion, and as an exception to one of the most important protections that we have for democracy and individual liberty, namely the Posse Comitatus Act, it should be drafted narrowly and with safeguards against abuse. And actually, the original version of the law, which dates back to 1792, had safeguards built in. It required ex-ante judicial approval for deployments. It provided that the authority to deploy troops would terminate thirty days after the next session of Congress began. It only authorized the deployment of the militia, not active-duty troops. It included a sunset. And then over time, these protections were stripped out of the law. And I think it’s clear in today’s environment that greater safeguards are needed.

A critical way in which it needs to be reformed is that the criteria for deployment need to be narrowed. One provision of the law authorizes deployment when there is a “conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of Justice under those laws.” Taken literally, that would allow the President to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division in response to two people trying to intimidate a witness in a federal trial. In addition, the law should be reformed to insure the Congress and the courts have a meaningful role in checking abuse.

If the President does invoke the Insurrection Act, where would the challenges come from? Who would the plaintiffs be in a case like this? Would the challenge come from citizens or states? How might that work?

I think it would come from states, especially if President Trump federalized the National Guard forces in those states and removed them from the command and control of the governor. But even if not, I think that the states would bring lawsuits and to the extent that the deployment of troops exacerbated the unrest in those states and required a greater deployment, or put a strain on state and local law enforcement in responding to that unrest, that would be a basis for the states to bring a lawsuit. In addition, any person who is injured by the deployment of troops under the Insurrection Act would have standing to bring a lawsuit. And by injured, I don’t mean literally physically injured, but harmed in some way by the deployment. So it could come from individuals. It almost certainly would come from states.

You mentioned earlier that the National Guard originally was seen as not being very competent. Without wanting Trump to do this, of course, it occurred to me that the idea of Minneapolis having American troops in it as opposed to ICE agents does in many ways seem like it could result in a lowering of the temperature.

It is true that service members are more disciplined than ICE officials, but there are a couple of caveats there. First of all, even though they are better disciplined and more professional, they also are not trained in civilian law enforcement or in quelling civil unrest. That is not their training. They are trained to fight and destroy an enemy. And so in a tense face-off or confrontation with civilians, there is a danger that they will fall back on their combat training. I think we cannot discount that. In Los Angeles, for example, there was a situation where marines were accompanying police to a house where there was a domestic disturbance and the police officers said to “cover me” as they went into the house. “Cover” means something very different in the Marines, and they opened fire on the house. It was only by good fortune that no one was killed.

The very, very different training and mind-set and culture of the armed forces make them a poor fit for this kind of mission. And the Administration acknowledged this in the briefs that they filed in the Supreme Court appeal on the National Guard case—they said that the reason that they could invoke that law without deploying active-duty armed forces is because the standing military is less well suited than the National Guard to perform this kind of mission. Not only that, the Administration said that using the standing military to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois would significantly impede execution of the federal immigration law.

Sure, but they will just change their position on this.

You’re not wrong. But it’s pretty awkward when they’ve made that representation to the Supreme Court.

The other point that I want to make is that if the military were being deployed to try to bring ICE under control, that would be one thing. That’s not the purpose. The purpose of deploying the military here would be to enable the violence and lawlessness that we’re seeing from ICE. And so even if the military itself is not engaging in these kinds of destructive actions, it is there to insure that ICE is able to do so. It would serve in that way as a force amplifier for ICE. ♦

In January, 2022, the British cellist Steven Isserlis was walking to a professional engagement when catastrophe struck. The skies opened. Isserlis was holding the three-hundred-year-old cello he prizes above all other possessions, and he watched in horror as it was ruined in the pouring rain. At last, to his inexpressible relief, he woke up.

Isserlis often has nightmares about his cello. Losing it. Leaving it somewhere. The strings falling off without warning. At sixty-seven, he is one of the world’s most celebrated concert cellists, but when he thinks about these scenarios he frowns and gently shakes his baroque gray ringlets. For more than fifteen years, Isserlis has been playing an eighteenth-century Stradivarius cello named the Marquis de Corberon, for the French aristocrat who once owned it. Though it spends most of its time in a white hard-shell case, it faces an array of dangers limited only by the whims of fate and, perhaps, the scope of its owner’s imagination. Speaking to me at his living-room table, in North London, Isserlis suddenly stood up and began speed-walking away. “I’m just going to rush into the other room and put the cello in the case,” he said, his voice growing fainter, “because I’m worried it’s getting cold.”

Isserlis’s instrument is about four feet tall. Worth millions of British pounds, it was crafted in 1726, when Antonio Stradivari, the Cremonese luthier, was in his eighties. Over the course of his career, Stradivari went from making large, lumbering cellos to creating smaller, more innovative ones that became the blueprint for the modern instrument. The Marquis is one of the last pieces he made in this classic form. “The sound is uniquely magnificent,” Robert Brewer Young, a luthier who has made more than fifteen copies of this specific instrument, told me. “There’s an archetypal form of cello that has a perfect evolution, and ends, as far as we know, with the Marquis de Corberon.”

Each evening, Isserlis plants a goodnight kiss on the cello’s beechwood scroll as he returns it to its case. Someday, he knows, he will do this for the last time—not because the instrument will be stolen, or damaged, but because it doesn’t belong to him. The 1726 Marquis de Corberon Stradivarius is owned by London’s Royal Academy of Music, which has entrusted it to Isserlis on a long-term loan.

The Academy provides plenty of students with instruments from its collection, but the Marquis is the only trophy piece that also lives and travels with an international soloist. People at the Academy speak about the pair as if they were joint and equal envoys for the institution. “Steven is a great ambassador for the collection and for the Academy,” Susana Caldeira, the Academy’s head of collections, said. “And so is the instrument.” The loan comes with strict conditions about travel, security, and maintenance; if Isserlis violates these conditions, the instrument could be instantly recalled. In fact, it could be recalled at almost any time. When the arrangement was most recently renewed, the academy reminded Isserlis that the loan’s term was five years. “I said, ‘No, it’s a loan for life’,” Isserlis told me. “ ‘Because if you take it away from me, I’ll kill myself.’ ”

Isserlis was born in London to a musical family, and rose to prominence around 1992, when his recording of “The Protecting Veil,” a soaring, hypnotic work for cello and orchestra by John Tavener, became a rare classical best-seller. In Britain, he is now something of a classical-music celebrity, interviewing widely, presenting documentaries, and publishing children’s books about the lives of great composers. His concert schedule is considered extreme even by industry veterans. “He can’t do anything less than a hundred and ten per cent all of the time,” Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, told me. “That’s the way he plays the cello. That’s him.”

Isserlis told me that he flies at least a hundred times a year, and mostly he brings the Marquis with him. Flying is difficult. The cello can’t go in the hold, he explained. (“Would you put your baby in the hold?” he asked.) The Marquis gets its own seat. What it lacks is a passport number, which means it has spent a lot of time being snarled in airline check-in systems. Isserlis has often missed a can’t-miss flight while standing in a terminal lobby, watching the clock tick down.

Then there’s security. At London’s Heathrow Airport, Isserlis told me, the process involves widely spaced mechanical rollers that cause him grief and anxiety. Isserlis asked if I knew the machines at Heathrow. I said I did, but not in detail. “You would if you were a cellist,” he said. Beyond security are more horrors. If Isserlis needs to use the toilet, the cello must come with him. On flights, there is turbulence. And, in a few days, there is another plane to catch.

“It’s a big responsibility in a way you can’t think about that much,” Isserlis told me. “Because, if you do, you go mad.” Before his never-ending tours, Isserlis has to tell the Academy if he plans to visit countries that may be unsafe, so that the institution can assess risk. The cello must be evaluated in-house once a year. New conditions can also be proposed at will by the cello’s insurers, making Isserlis’s life instantly more confusing or expensive. “I know exactly what to expect when Steven comes through the door,” Freeman-Attwood told me, in a practiced, understanding voice. “But we always find a workable solution.”

For Isserlis, the conditional nature of the arrangement is painful in and of itself. An instrument is an epoch in a player’s life, and Isserlis can tell the story of his career through the cellos he’s used: a soft-spoken Guadagnini, bought in the seventies for the now-low price of thirty-five thousand pounds; a robust and hearty Montagnana, perfect for playing concertos with powerful orchestras; even another Stradivarius, borrowed from Japan’s Nippon Music Foundation at the turn of the millennium, once his musical star was truly ascendant. Isserlis returned that cello after being offered the Marquis: a tacit recognition that he was now the preëminent solo cellist in England.

There seemed to be an element of destiny at work, because he had encountered the Marquis long before. In the nineties, Isserlis was attending a chamber-music festival on the Cornish coast when he heard Zara Nelsova, often called the Queen of the Cello, give a small recital. Nelsova, with her pearl necklace and coiffed volutes of blond hair, was celebrated as a player of extravagant power. At close quarters, Isserlis could feel the depth and resonance of her instrument. A friend turned to him and said, “That’s the cello for you.”

In 1960, the cello had been donated to the Royal Academy of Music, on the strict condition that it would be loaned to Nelsova for as long as she lived. A deep bond seemed to exist between the pair. In the early two-thousands, when Nelsova was dying, Isserlis visited her Manhattan apartment, which overlooked Central Park. He found her in bed, lying next to the cello. It was still there when the Academy sent someone to retrieve it after her death, resting alone on the silky red bedspread.

When Isserlis was born, in 1958, a Stradivarius might have set you back a hundred thousand dollars. Today, one costs millions, a price even successful soloists can’t afford. Instead, many players compete to use instruments owned by foundations and wealthy benefactors. In this inscrutable economy, prestige has a way of slipping between people and objects. The use of a precious instrument confers status on a player until he reaches a certain level of fame, at which point the relationship inverts, and the player starts adding market value to the instrument. Concert programs and CD liners keep careful track of who plays what, and by whose leave. For a small circle of connoisseurs, these alliances are almost as absorbing as the music itself.

Occasionally, dealers and patrons will arrange short-term loans for select players, even if doing so involves flying the instruments halfway around the world for an evening. Joey Carr, a former employee of the London violin dealer J & A Beare, told me that she was once asked to transport an entire quartet for a concert. To get through the airport, Carr said, she wore a cello on her back and a travel bag around her neck, with a double violin case in one hand and a viola case in the other. “It’s very hard to just get a coffee on the way to the plane,” she said, “because your hands are full of millions of pounds’ worth of violins and cellos.”

Great instruments confound our sense of why and how things are valuable. A seven-figure price tag reminds us of paintings, another class of object that concentrates huge amounts of capital. Yet instruments are also tools, a way of making the marvellous sound from which their value is supposed to derive. Each part of a violin’s sculptural beauty has a specific, practical function aimed at helping the player make the best music they can. The challenge that confronts the caretakers of these objects is considerable: how do you conserve an instrument when so much of its value stems from its use as an instrument, out in the hard-edged world, with all the risks that entails?

Long-term loans to trusted players, like Isserlis, are one practical solution, but they have their own problems. Theoretically, there’s merit in a system that tries to match the best players with the best instruments. But the practical upshot is a conservationist’s nightmare: a large proportion of the world’s best string instruments spend their lives travelling the globe for the benefit of audiences that would cheerfully admit they can’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a modern instrument. It is hard to think of objects this valuable that also fly this much, apart from perhaps the planes themselves.

The question of how to fly with a cello is a bugbear among many string players. After making inquiries about Isserlis’s cello case, I found myself on the phone with its maker, Alan Stevenson, an English musician who got into the protection industry in the seventies, after watching a dropped double-bass shatter into hundreds of pieces. (Stevenson died late last year.) He said he asked every customer whether they were planning to check their cello; if they said yes, he would only sell them one of his stronger cases. “Part of my business is trying to protect cellos from the cellist,” he said.

For Stevenson, what mattered most was a musician’s level of “awareness”—a term he used with repeated, baleful emphasis. I told him I had watched Isserlis run from the room to prevent his cello from getting cold. “He’s aware, you see,” Stevenson said. He told me that a top player might warily check a good modern cello worth, say, thirty-five thousand pounds. “But for another cellist that thirty-five thousand pounds is a fortune, yeah?” Stevenson said. “That other cellist wouldn’t dare check it in. He’ll check in a five-thousand-pound cello.” Theoretically, you could plot every string player on earth on a graph with two axes: the ability to bear the costs of potential damage, and the psychological tolerance of risk. Somewhere along the line, everyone breaks.

Perhaps some level of pain is hard-coded into the life of a professional soloist, whose existence is structured around the act of performing complex music to an impossibly high standard. Isserlis described his world as one of airports, green rooms, restaurants, and hotels. “I often say I should get a life,” he offered, brightly. But he also told me, in more subdued tones, about the terror before a concert, the sense of vulnerability and exposure. As his audiences have grown, so, too, have the expectations.

When I first met Isserlis, I hoped to ask him about the most famous pieces in the cello repertoire: the mysterious suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, about which he once wrote a colorful and opinionated book. To my surprise, Isserlis told me he no longer plays them in concert. We were sitting on the empty stage of Wigmore Hall, a splendid chamber hall in central London that Isserlis calls his “musical home.” Almost ten years earlier, he had performed the suites here for sellout crowds over two nights. Isserlis said these were probably the most successful concerts he had ever done, but the experience was so torturous he never wanted to repeat it. The thought of going out there alone, playing unforgiving Bach from memory, was too frightening. “Here I am playing my favorite music, in my favorite hall, with my favorite cello, with my favorite bow,” he said. “So the only thing that can possibly be bad is me.”

Since we were alone, I asked Isserlis if he would play something, just so I could hear the cello at close range. Obligingly, he opened the battle-scarred case and pinioned the instrument between his knees, before leaning the scroll against his chest. As his body made contact with the instrument, he gave a boyish smile. “It feels like a part of me,” he said. “It really does.” Then he laid his bow on the strings and played two octaves of a simple minor scale.

I had been worried that the subtle beauties of this great instrument would elude me. Perhaps they did. I can only report that I was literally struck by the sound he made. Vibrations filled the air, making it feel like an element in which we were both swimming. I felt grateful for the cumulative human effort that had produced this ether from horsehair, sheep gut, and wood. When silence resumed, I told Isserlis he seemed visibly relaxed with the cello in his arms. “Well, it would be sad if I wasn’t,” he laughed. “Since I do it every day.” Before the instrument went back in its case, I caught a look at its wooden back. Near the neck was a big knot, where a branch once grew. ♦

On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

In Iran, the despotic regime is fragile and desperate, and, as Merz suggests, it may soon fall. But it may also survive, by means of violent repression, and by Thursday the news from Tehran had quieted. Sounds of gunfire had faded; there were no new bonfires. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its allies had maintained a system of humanitarian interventionism, until the President so delightedly detonated it. “In the first year of his administration,” the Times noted last week, Trump “dismantled the instruments of soft power—such as Voice of America and the State Department unit that dropped internet capability into Iran—that were key to democracy promotion.” What he is left with are his threats and a hollow sort of exhortation that borrows from the same program of humanitarian interventionism that he has so explicitly disavowed. “Iran is looking at freedom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “perhaps like never before.”

Perhaps. The President’s statements of allegiance—and, potentially, the internet that Elon Musk has offered to make available for free via Starlink—may well strengthen the resolve of the Iranian opposition. But Trump’s domestic acts, in a countervailing way, may embolden the regime. Cynicism travels, too. Right now, he is faced with a mass protest in Minneapolis against a government show of power that is growing increasingly unpopular, and his reaction has been to double down: on Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops to the upper Midwest.

What supplies all these events with a sense of approaching a precipice is the open contestation between pro- and anti-democratic forces, happening both here and abroad, in view of each other. Through the partial curtain between the two societies, we are watching what is happening in Iran. And Iran, surely, is watching us. ♦